RESEARCHERS say eating more like prehistoric people did can lower your risk of heart disease and diabetes.

The World Health Organization estimates that in 2016, almost 2 billion adults worldwide were overweight or obese.

One theory behind why obesity rates have grown so significantly is the “mismatch theory,” which argues that what humans eat has evolved over millennia to process a certain diet that no longer matches the diets that people have been eating over the past 50 years.

Testing that theory is the aim of a new study in the journal Science Advances.

The research looked at the Turkana people, a population from northwest Kenya that has seen a split in its population from those who still follow a traditional subsistence lifestyle and those moving to the city and adopting a more modern diet.

That gave scientists a unique insight into the direct effects of switching to a diet close to what many human ancestors ate — a native diet, so to speak — and the kinds of foods much of the world eats today.

Looking at 1,226 adult Turkana in 44 locations, the researchers found that those Turkana still living their traditional pastoral lifestyles scored high on all 10 biomarkers for health, including cardiometabolic health.

Those living in cities, however, had poorer health biomarkers, including higher rates of obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and high blood pressure. The differences also showed a correlation between how long various Turkana had been living in cities and an increase in these lower health scores.

“Humans evolved in a very different environment than the one we’re currently living in,” Amanda Lea, a lead author of the study and a postdoctoral research fellow in the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton, said in a press release.

“No one diet is universally bad,” Lea continued. “It’s about the mismatch between your evolutionary history and what you’re currently eating.”

“Tragically, the modern diet exploits the body’s natural tendency to ‘plan for the future,’” said Benjamin J. Bikman, a metabolic research scientist and associate professor of physiology and developmental biology at Brigham Young University in Utah.

“When following a traditional style of living, including the traditional diet, food isn’t abundant. Thus, the body is built to store energy when it can to prepare for a future time where food may be scarce,” Bikman said. “In our modern environment, the abundance and consistent access to processed foods mean that our bodies are saving energy for a period of scarcity that never arrives.”

Eating more whole grains, fruits and vegetables, and healthy fats is already the bedrock of many healthy diets that experts already recommend.

Among them are the low carb, whole-food diet, the Mediterranean diet, and the Paleo diet, to name a few.

“Our modern food environment is not conducive to health,” said Nicole Avena-Blanchard, an assistant professor at Mount Sinai Medical School in New York and a visiting professor of health psychology at Princeton University in New Jersey.

(SD-Agencies)